Our Aunts' Tables

Virginia Stem Owens

EVEN if I were blind and deaf, I could still tell which of my aunts' tables I was sitting at just by tasting the food. For instance, at my Aunt Bessie's the food is heavy with fat. I don't mean that it's greasy or slick like fast food fries or cold pizza. I mean it rests on a solid foundation of fat, the kind that fuels people who chop cotton or split wood all day. The biscuits have a strata of shortening in them that can sustain a farmer's metabolism. The collards are laced with slivers of salt pork. Puddles of chicken fat collect in the cornbread dressing yellow with egg yolks. No one in our family works hard enough to burn off that much fat anymore. But burying your tongue in my aunt's butter is like melting history in your mouth, at least the history of East Texas dirt farmers and sawmill workers.

At my Aunt Rhonda's I can recognize the sharp, smoky flavor of the barbecue she cooks for a living at her shabby little clapboard cafe out at the lake. Being an alcoholic, she doesn't eat much herself, but barbecue remains her religion. She mixes her sauce with as much care as an altar guild decants communion wine for consecration, even though in Texas barbecue the sauce is only secondary. In fact, you could do without the sauce altogether if need be, just like when they used to give you only the bread and not the wine at communion.

Mainly the flavor comes from the smoke of whatever kind of wood is used for the fuel. Hickory has always been the tradition in this part of the state where the blue haze of its smoke hangs like a canopy in the heavy Gulf air. Like all smells, it is pre-rational, reaching down deep into the roots of the brain stem. Aunt Rhonda considered switching to mesquite once, an innovation recently imported from West Texas, but decided that would be like switching from tawny port to angelica at the altar rail. Some things ought to be so familiar you don't even need to notice.

Every morning she lays out her meat like an offering on the metal racks and damps down the coals. Then she covers it all up to do its work of transubstantiation from slabs of long-fibered muscle, parabolas of bone, and gut-encased ground fat and flesh into barbecued brisket, ribs, and sausage. Around the edges, like Abraham's first sacrifice at Mamre, she places the chickens.

Then she sits down to wait and drink till it's done. And, as with Abraham, a thick and dread darkness sometimes comes over her there. Sometimes her husband Leon—no one in the family is sure just what number he is in a thirty-five year succession of husbands—has to call one of her friends to come get her. "I can't have her running off the customers," he says. Actually what he doesn't like is when she tries to get the man who drives the beer truck to kiss her.

But somehow, despite all this, the barbecue always gets done. And when she reaches in and pulls out a slab with her long-tined fork, the aroma envelopes you like a cloud of incense and your knees go weak. Before she puts it through the electric slicer, she takes a butcher knife honed over the years to a narrow scallop and whittles off an end to see how far the smoke has penetrated. She likes the outside to be crusty, then a quarter-inch of dark brown and finally a red zone like tender, healing flesh surrounding the taupe middle. She offers you some from her fingers coated with crackled fat, and you know when you taste it that this barbecue has been brooded over, like creation itself.

Aunt Verna is another story altogether though. As my youngest aunt, she represents a different generation and her cooking shows it. Her favorite dish is tuna casserole. She makes it for two reasons. First, it's quick and easy. Second, it's something she never ate at home when she was growing up.

She lives in a townhouse bought with the proceeds of her last divorce, and never eats, if she can help it, food that looks like where it came from. Tuna from a can looks nothing at all like a fish. Nor do the packaged noodles resemble grain or the mushrooms in the canned soup have any damp horse manure clinging to them. She likes there to be as much distance as possible between the farm and the table. She only buys canned fruit, and one of her specialties is half a pear made to look like a bunny by sticking two strips of cheese in one end for ears and a dollop of mayonnaise on the other for a tail.

She only makes these dishes for company though. I don't think she cooks at all when she's alone. Ordinarily, she has cartons of energy bars and a collection of powders she mixes with milk and drinks like medicine.

On the farm when she was a girl she used to have to pluck the chickens, and it's true that there's nothing like the smell of scalded feathers to kill your appetite. She would look at the headless body flopping in the dust, then grab it by its yellow, scaly feet, and plunge it into the tub of hot water as though she were ridding the world of a scourge. The ghosts of those luckless chickens hover over her tuna casserole today.

If it's true that you are what you eat, then what does not liking to eat at all say about you? My Aunt Adele doesn't like to eat, claims she finds no intrinsic pleasure in food. She eats only because it's a biological necessity. She laughed when I told her one time that I found potato soup comforting. The idea of food offering comfort struck her as bizarre. She does admit, though, to finding a certain enjoyment in avocados and Harvey's Bristol Cream. I figured that might point to a taste for heavy, creamy textures. But it turns out she hates bananas. And even milk, for that matter.

Of course, when she was growing up on a string of East Texas dirt farms she had no idea that the world contained anything so exotic as avocados. But it just so happened that, after World War II, she married a man grimly determined to rise in the world. He started out in a radiator shop in north Houston and progressed through several automobile dealerships to owning one of the biggest stretch-limo companies in the country. He loves to eat about as much as she hates it. In fact, I suspect her own disdain for the sheer physical processes of salivating, masticating, and digesting comes from having watched him gobble up clients, partners, deals, and two of their sons.

Yet despite her own aversion to food, I would still recognize even her table, blindfolded and deaf, with only my taste buds and olfactory nerves to depend on, because she cooks—when she cooks now—to fit the class into which she has risen, not through her own efforts, but as though she were a ship being lifted coolly, impassively, through the locks of the Panama Canal.

When she has a dinner party, she orders the best cuts from the best butcher and roasts them, in absolutely nude splendor, with none of the canned soups or powdered mixes the middle class relies on to bolster gristly pot roasts. Hers is the only one of my aunts' tables at which I might find shrimp, large and pink as babies, lying splayed open like Rorschach tests on ice. Or lemon sorbet. No one back in East Texas has ever even heard of lemon sorbet.

It is truly wonderful food, but meant more for titillation than comfort. You feel almost wicked, eating one of her late night dinners. You watch the pools of tepid blood collect on the china plate and realize that you are eating undisguised, sacrificed animal. You look at the long bodies of the hyper-green broccoli spears or asparagus stalks, bared and hard-edged, not sunk in sauce, and feel you are devouring an art object.

Like I say, she doesn't eat much herself. Maybe it's her way of protesting her husband's robber baron appetite. She's always trying to get him on a diet; he resists by sneaking down to the kitchen at night and eating peanut butter out of the jar with a tablespoon.

Her animosity toward food, so uncharacteristic of the rest of my family, I would certainly have shocked the generation of my great-aunts. For them, food not only meant survival, but it was one of their chief aesthetic pleasures and the showplace of their skill. When I think of them now, all of them dead, it is mostly through their food that I remember them. Great-aunt Jennie was Irish stew and vinegar pie. In her version of Irish stew, cooked in a pressure cooker to conserve fuel, the potatoes were quartered long ways. Short ribs, their marrow extruded from the cross cut bone-ends by the steam, floated like plump prizes. If you were fastidious, as I was as a child, you picked out the lean bits of meat from between the layers of bubbled fat and ivory integument clinging to the bones. But if you were a man who had been grappling logs to skid chains all day, you picked up the whole thing with your fingers and pulled the fat, lean, and gristle together from the bone with your teeth and took a long time to chew it. Then you sucked the bones for whatever juice you could get out of them.

The vinegar pie, made in winter when all the summer fruit had either been eaten or made into jelly, was best cold, after the "grey, cinnamon-speckled thickening had congealed between the thick strips of leaden dough. It landed with a thud in the stomach, tart enough to fool the tastebuds into registering "blackberries" or maybe "plums" and heavy enough with shortening to keep the stomach quiescent for a full four hours.

Another great-aunt was able, simply because her husband w as a refrigerator repairman instead of a farmer, to venture out from the staple diet of salt pork, heavy bread, and field peas. I ate my first lettuce-and-tomato salad at her table not long after World War II. Understand that the concept of "salad" is still suspect in a good many Texas kitchens even today, where raw food is considered dangerous and unnatural. Maybe it's only because the weather here is generally too hot to grow lettuce. Gardeners plant a hardier variety of greens—mustard, turnips, collards—all of which have to be cooked to make them edible.

That first salad I ate at my great-aunt's table consisted of pieces of tomato and iceberg lettuce not much larger than chunks of chopped onion, all thoroughly coated with straight mayonnaise, as though literally to dress its nakedness. Despite this covering, the older people around the table passed the bowl on with a scornful remark about "rabbit food." Only animals ate uncooked food. They sensed some theological issue was at stake here. After all, Nebuchadnezzar, in the Bible, had been punished by having to eat grass in the field like an ox. And look what happened to Eve just for tasting a fresh-picked apple, one that hadn't even been peeled. Eating salad was skating on thin ice.

This same great-aunt who first served the salads (she had also taken up smoking in the 1920's) was devoted to food. Her table was her altar. To her, a hearty appetite was evidence of both physical and spiritual health. She later gave up cigarettes when she was in her sixties—just laid an open pack down on the kitchen table and never took them up again. But she never renounced her faith in food. She lived to be eighty, and every day for a year before she died she called me up to ask what I was having for dinner. Maybe she was checking on the condition of my soul. In which case, it probably wasn't a bad question to ask.

What I do most often these days is put a cardboard carton, slit along one side, into the microwave after looking at the picture on the box to see if it in any way mirrors the hankerings of my insides. The matches, of course, are never exact, but I fill in the gaps with a tumbler of white wine. If there's time, I sprinkle a little garlic salt and lemon juice over what's left of a head of Romaine lettuce at the bottom of the refrigerator.

On weekends, my husband and I eat out or go to visit my mother who serves what we now call "real food," meaning she peels her own potatoes, dismembers the chicken herself, and bakes, rather than thaws, the cake.

I used to cook like that too, when I had children at home. And I still have the grace to feel a little rueful about my cardboard cartons. I know life is not meant to be lived this way. And despite my practical apostasy, I still give intellectual assent to my family's food creed. Maybe a culture's spiritual condition can be indexed to its cooking. Do we tend to give up God when we give up making gravy? Might one's final meaning to the world be meatloaf? I admit to feeling a little like the Prodigal Son these days. "How many of my father's hired men have food and to spare?" he said as he contemplated the husks in the hog pen. He at least wasted his substance on riotous living while my only excuse for eating husks is hard work and long commutes.

I try to compensate for my lapsed faith by going, every couple of weeks, to a farmers' market several miles from my office. I buy a few winesap apples and local tomatoes, maybe a pepper and avocados. But mostly I wander among the counters of mustard greens and crookneck squash, okra and black-eyed peas—all the vegetables outside my reach now because I can't afford the time and effort it takes to wash and slice, shell and cook. I breathe, breathe in their scents, chemical compounds transmuted from the darkness beneath the surface of the earth and now cast lavishly upon the open air. This is both my reward for having retained my faith and my penance for not practicing it.

When my own daughters come home from college, the first place they head is the refrigerator. They stare into its stagelit interior as though into memory itself, hoping to discover some familiar reference point. They find leftover spaghetti sauce, a jar of pickles, the extra chocolate pudding. They eat these, standing at the sink, and feel the juices running down into the desiccated cracks of their wounds of bewilderment at the world. If they come home unexpectedly and find the larder bare, they feel betrayed. "Don't you have anything to eat in this house?" they say. As though eating were the only justification for houses. And maybe it is. In fact, sometimes I think human history is just one long, twisting gut through which winds a river of sauces, slices, fricassees, stews, sausages, roots, berries, bones, bread.

I worry about my daughters and whether they'll have any tables to remember. I feel guilty about my own monastic refrigerator, almost as if I'd abandoned my temporal responsibilities in order to run off and become a nun in middle-age.

But now that I come to think of it, my daughters do have an aunt in Santa Fe who goes to a Chinese acupuncturist for nutritional direction. He mostly tells her the things she can't eat—like the produce of night-blooming plants. She's every bit as serious about food as my great-aunts were since this diet is a part of the spiritual regimen she calls "finding herself." They have another aunt who grew up as a southside Chicago Catholic but who now lives in North Carolina and does macrobiotic shabbat meals. The last time they ate at her house they had blue corn polenta over which she prayed in breathless Hebrew as she lit the sabbath candles.

I suppose we could put these culinary paradigm shifts down to cultural rejection. The Santa Fe sister-in-law grew up playing on Southern Baptist softball teams in Texas which she claims dislocated her sexual orientation. The one in North Carolina hungers for a stabler family than her alcoholic father provided. They re not nostalgic about their past; they're angry with it. And the best way to kill it is to starve it to death, to cut the food chain that binds them to it.

But I think this goes beyond shifting cultural patterns. I think we serve up our souls to one another, pass them around the table as baldly as John the Baptist's head on its platter. Food is the one inescapable sacrament, even for apostates. My own great-aunts tried to beef up the spirit, to keep it hoping during physical adversity, and my daughters' aunts dish up the culinary equivalent of hair-shirts during a period of affluence. But each in her own way is ladling out her creed, her dogma, her deepest held beliefs to those around her table.

Visit Virginia Stem Owens as Image Artist of the Month for June '03

Issue #1• Spring 1989